In the News 09.24.18 : Today’s Articles of Interest from Around the Internets

The Outrageous Plan To Haul Icebergs To Africa

If towing icebergs to hot, water-stressed regions sounds totally crazy to you, then consider this: the volume of water that breaks off Antarctica as icebergs each year is greater than the total global consumption of freshwater. And that stat doesn’t even include Arctic ice. This is pure freshwater, effectively wasted as it melts into the sea and contributes to rising sea levels. Does it sound less crazy now?

This untapped flow of water has enticed scientists and entrepreneurs for over a century.There were 19th-Century schemes to deliver by steam-boat to India, and to supply breweries in Chile. In the 1940s, John Isaacs of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute proposed towing an iceberg to San Diego to quench a Californian drought. In the 1970s, Saudi Prince Mohamed Al-Faisal wanted to tow an Antarctic iceberg across the equator to Saudi Arabia, and funded two international conferences on the subject. The EU received proposals in the 2010s to tow an iceberg from Newfoundland to the Canary Islands.

All these plans have one thing in common, however – none of them ever actually happened.

Hitler ENTJ

IN AN ESSAY THAT SHE WROTE in 1937 but never published called “My Country ’Tis of Thee—The Cult of Leadership,” Katharine Briggs, co-creator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, took a faithfully Jungian approach to typing Adolf Hitler’s personality. On a three-by-five-inch index card, she labeled him an extrovert (E) and an “excessive and unmitigated thinker” (T), blaming his personality for interwar Germany’s abnormal “psychology of political regimentation.” Hitler was a “political go-getter,” she claimed, who had come to power in the 1930s by persuading intellectuals, scientists, and bureaucrats to abandon all feeling judgments and, by extension, their moral obligations to others. “The passion for planning everything and running everything according to plan was very characteristic of the old Germany where everything was efficient, organized, and the planning worked fairly well so long as it was moderated by a collective morality based upon the Christian tradition,” she wrote. But when modernity had crowded out Christianity, Germany had shown the world what happened when “all the thinking is done to order by a few people, while the vast majority, made completely gang-minded and irresponsible by the loss of their traditional morality, become body cells to the brain-cells of ego inflated political go-getters.”

Compare her writing on Hitler to the notes of Henry Murray, director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic and the man responsible for transforming personality from a mystical quality into an object of rigorous study:

The Plot To Subvert An Election

ON AN OCTOBER AFTERNOON BEFORE THE 2016 ELECTION, a huge banner was unfurled from the Manhattan Bridge in New York City: Vladimir V. Putin against a Russian-flag background, and the unlikely word “Peacemaker” below. It was a daredevil happy birthday to the Russian president, who was turning 64.

In November, shortly after Donald J. Trump eked out a victory that Moscow had worked to assist, an even bigger banner appeared, this time on the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington: the face of President Barack Obama and “Goodbye Murderer” in big red letters.

Police never identified who had hung the banners, but there were clues. The earliest promoters of the images on Twitter were American-sounding accounts, including @LeroyLovesUSA, later exposed as Russian fakes operated from St. Petersburg to influence American voters.

The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history.

For many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. What Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain. President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.

But to travel back to 2016 and trace the major plotlines of the Russian attack is to underscore what we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.

Ranch Nation

As a young republic, our nation embraced the dressings of many lands: Italian, French, Russian and the magical Thousand Islands. But with the creation — and inexorable rise — of ranch, we have forged the one true American dressing.

Invented in the 1950s, ranch is now far and away the most popular salad dressing in the country, according to a 2017 study by the Association for Dressings and Sauces, an industry group. (Forty percent of Americans named ranch as their favorite dressing; its nearest competitor, Italian, came in at 10 percent.) And it has spread far beyond salad.

It is a routine dip for chicken wings, baby carrots, French fries, tortilla chips and mozzarella sticks. It is incorporated into American classics like macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, potato salad and Thanksgiving-turkey stuffing. And it is drizzled over tacos, Tater Tots, casseroles and — perhaps most controversially — pizza.

What makes ranch ranch? It’s a combination of creaminess (from buttermilk, sour cream, sometimes mayonnaise) and herbaceousness (often parsley, thyme, dill), plus a long pull of allium (onion and garlic) and a shot of black pepper. Ranch seasoning eliminates the creamy element, making it a dry spice mix like any other, ready to be added to Chex Mix, shaken onto popcorn or mixed into biscuits.

The Extraordinary Story Of How I Found My Parents

Nguyen Quoc Tuy was born in 1970 or 1971 in Sa Dec, a small town in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

Tuy – pronounced two-ee – was handed over to the local church, which doubled as an orphanage, when he was just seven days old.

The protracted and bloody Vietnam War – called the American War by the Vietnamese – was still raging in the swampy delta region to the south of Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, as it was called then.

When he was one, Tuy contracted the polio virus from contaminated water. The virus attacked the muscles in his legs and left his lower limbs under-developed.

By the time he was three, he was moved to a better-equipped orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City and, because of his health condition, was soon put on an adoption list.

Thousands of miles away, a couple on the west coast of the United States were preparing to give him a new home.

Tuy’s future American parents, Kristin and Thomas Buckner, had decided to create a multi-cultural family and give “forgotten” youngsters a chance to thrive.

They already had a biological child, Paul, and then began adopting children from around the world.

“We wanted a large family,” says Thomas, “but at that time, there was a lot of talk about the planet’s growing population. We decided to bring only one kid into the world ourselves, because there were so many other children needing families.”

Kristin – now known by her maiden name, Brockschmidt, after she and Thomas divorced – says the size of their family was created as much by “blind luck” as any firm philosophy or plan.

“It’s a little-known fact that, just as you can accidentally become pregnant and have a surprise baby, you can also accidentally find yourself adopting,” she jokes.

“In Vietnam, Tuy was listed as abandoned. They said no-one had visited him since he was placed at the orphanage.

“He was thought to be about three years old,” she explains, recalling her conversations with a US adoption agency more than 40 years ago.

Thomas says Tuy only ended up with his family – in the autumn of 1974 – because their plans to adopt another Vietnamese boy were postponed.

“We had wanted to take a child we were going to call Robin, but there were delays due to his mental disability. In the meantime, we agreed to take another boy – that boy was Tuy.”

Tuy became the fourth Buckner sibling. Two more children – including Robin – were to follow.

Tuy laughs, “We were the Buckner Bunch, mimicking the classic American TV show, The Brady Bunch.”